


Bet the House

by Celia_and



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Prostitution, Angst, Banter, Bickering, Body Image, Coming In Pants, Drinking, Eating, Emotional Baggage, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Foot Jobs, Groping, Hopeful Ending, Is there a tag for "going through the entire spectrum of human emotion in one night", Las Vegas, No Pregnancy, Pretty Woman References, Prostitution, References to fear about physical safety relating to sex work, Sex Worker Rey (Star Wars), Smut, Soft Ben Solo, Strangers to startlingly intimate, These babies are COMPLICATED, When Ben Solo falls he falls hard, bathrobes, paying for sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 15:21:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29951955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celia_and/pseuds/Celia_and
Summary: “Am I reading this right?”She smiles. He’s getting easier to fit into a mental box by the minute. She can tuck him snug and comfortable into the box labeled “Isn’t sure the woman approaching him is a professional even when her opening line is something like ‘Buy me a drink, sugar.’”The server deposits their drinks on the table. Rey raises her glass in a toast. “I’m more fun than roulette. Promise.”----------A Las Vegas sex worker AU
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 94
Kudos: 367





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alantieislander](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alantieislander/gifts).



> Okay, here’s the thing. I’ve tagged this fic hopeful ending and not happy ending for a reason. I have the whole story written, and it ends with the strong implication that they’re going to be together—there isn’t any other way to reasonably interpret the ending—but you don’t _see_ their reunion beyond a brief glimpse. If that’s not a fic you’d like to read, here’s your chance to click away. If you decide to come along, thanks. I really love this one, y’all.
> 
> Other notes:  
> 1\. I don’t have a particular update schedule in mind, but I will be able to update regularly due to having the fic fully written.  
> 2\. Additional tags will be added as the fic progresses.  
> 3\. This stunning moodboard is by my lovely friend [Allison](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alantieislander) 💛

She only really notices him because of how out of place he is. Not in a way that she can put her finger on, though, and it’s mildly frustrating. She should let her gaze keep skimming the bar, but instead she finds herself watching him.

The man who doesn’t belong. Not that anyone belongs in this town, really, where neon shines on sand and the house always wins.

She works this hotel because it has the biggest conference center on the strip. That’s her target demographic: businessmen willing to splurge on a sure thing. She’s a much better expenditure than a slot machine.

She’s good at this. She’s good at picking her customers and telling them what they want to hear—what will get her a hand on the small of her back and a panting elevator ride and a key card swiped in an anonymous lock. She’s good at the part that comes next, too. The letting them think they’re in control. The wish fulfillment. The illusion that she would be here even if not for the wad of folded bills newly padding her clutch: that her dress wasn’t tugged to the floor by the weight of their money. The impression of virility. Desirability. She gives them all that, besides the other thing. That part’s the easiest, in some ways, but decidedly distasteful, with their pawing and their grunting and their labored breaths. She’s yet to meet the man who can keep his dignity during that part. But they never get to see her disdain.

She’s in the ultimate customer service profession, after all.

Yes, she’s good at this. Which makes it all the more strange that this man doesn’t fit into any of her exhaustive mental boxes. Four-figure suit, for sure. The watch might be five. She can spot world-class tailoring at fifty yards. Probably mid-thirties. Strikingly... handsome, maybe? Strikingly striking, at least. Taller than necessary to be called tall, and generously broad in a way that still manages to be lean. She usually wouldn’t bother with his type; she learned to spot the fake Rolexes not to avoid their owners but to seek them out. There’s a menace that comes with excessive wealth. The best way she knows not to become a bloody headline is to avoid the CEOs. They tend to forget there’s a limit to their power, and she’d rather her body not be involved in that lapse of memory. She’ll take a low-level manager any day. Men who’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a boss are dangerous.

This man is no low-level manager. But still she watches him.

There’s really only one thing this city truly excels at, besides elaborate artifice. There’s not much it has to offer in the way of entertainment that isn’t done better somewhere else. But there’s nowhere that can hold a candle to this town when it comes to people-watching. It’s a pastime all its own, and free, besides. Free for most people, that is. For her it comes at the cost of advances from men who interpret eye contact as invitation. But he’s not looking her way: this strange man. So she lets the ice in her ginless gin and tonic melt and she watches him.

He sits alone at a table for two. He should’ve become comfortable with the placement of his limbs at some point in his thirty-odd years of life, but he isn’t. He isn’t, and he’s gotten good at faking it, but she knows. The men who he sits in boardrooms with are fooled, probably, or perhaps he really is at ease there. It’s only here in the fake real world that he forgets what to do with all the extra inches of body he has. He doesn’t look like he’s enjoying himself. It doesn’t look like he’s here by choice, and yet it doesn’t seem like he’s waiting for someone. He would prefer to be in his hotel room, but he convinced himself that room service shouldn’t be his _every_ dinner. He’s nursing a brandy and counting down the minutes to when he’s going to allow himself to go upstairs. She takes a sip and studies his profile. She shouldn’t be surprised; everyone pretends. But when the pretense is for your own benefit and not others’, that’s when you tend to get into trouble. Not that she would know anything about that.

He makes her sad—this tall, beautiful man sitting alone—and that makes her angry. There isn’t much that she allows to sadden her, and he did it without her permission. By being an oversized boy playing dress-up in his dad’s suit and doing it so well that he fools everyone except her. She’s the only one who realizes that his bedtime should’ve been hours ago, and he should’ve had someone to tuck him in and kiss his forehead and leave the door just a little bit open so the hall light could chase away the monsters.

“So? Are you gonna make a move?” Finn is one of her favorite bartenders. A friend. Not _her_ friend, of course—she doesn’t have friends—but the kind of person who’s built to be a friend. Too good for this town, by far. He should move somewhere where people are friends.

She shakes her head but doesn’t stop watching. “Nah, too rich for my blood.”

Finn scoffs. “No such thing.”

“Has he paid yet?”

Finn nods. “Credit card. Not charged to a room.”

“Hmm.” There goes her theory about the hotel room beckoning upstairs. Unless he’s staying here and just opted to keep his dinner bill separate from his room bill. Who knows why rich people do anything.

“See, you _say_ you’re not gonna go for him, but you haven’t looked away in the past,” he checks his watch, “fourteen minutes.”

She glowers at Finn. “There. Happy now?”

He grins. “Ecstatic. Want another?”

She shakes her head. She doesn’t even like tonic water. She should start ordering Sprites.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” She frowns. “My heart isn’t in it tonight.”

He raises his eyebrows. “What, and it usually is?”

She shrugs apathetically.

“Hey, this isn’t like my best girl! Perk up, babe! Think of all the men waiting to be relieved of their extra cash! What will they do without you? Redistribution of wealth in action!”

She’s grudgingly chuckling by the end. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Ridiculously _right,_ and you know it. Now, what do you think about button-down Bob over there?”

She checks covertly. “Too young.”

Finn frowns. “Late twenties at least! Not exactly cradle-robbing material.”

“He’s spent the last decade desperate to recreate his frat house glory days. He probably thinks that if a woman can walk without wincing once he’s done with her, he didn’t do it right.”

“Ouch. Okay, how about that guy, by the planter? He’s at least fifty.”

“Here with his wife.”

“What? How do you know?”

“He’s clearly waiting for someone, and if it were anyone besides his wife he wouldn’t be wearing that horrendous tie.”

Finn tilts his head, seemingly impressed. “Who’re you gonna go for, then?”

She shrugs, and her eyes dart back to the man sitting alone. His brandy is finished. He’ll be leaving soon.

“You could just sleep with him, you know.”

She rouses herself. “Did I just hallucinate the whole conversation we’ve had about how I’m not going to?”

Finn shakes his head. “Off the clock, I mean.”

She looks down at her sweating glass. “Don’t be silly.”

“What’s so silly? You’re allowed to enjoy yourself, same as anyone else.”

“If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”

Finn scoffs. “Are you seriously quoting Heath Ledger’s Joker to me right now?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Babe. Take him upstairs or don’t, but I know you didn’t put _that_ dress on to sit around all night letting your ice melt.”

He likes to have the last word, Finn does. He times it so he can suddenly notice another patron getting his attention, and she’s left sitting on her barstool absorbing what he thinks passes for wisdom.

She hates this dress. She hates the way the gold sequins scratch her collarbones in the front, and the way that if she slouches even in the slightest everyone will see, because there’s no back. She doesn’t particularly like any of her work dresses—one can’t be sexy and comfortable at the same time—but she really hates this one. It doesn’t matter what she thinks of it, though. Actors don’t get to complain about their costumes. She’s not supposed to be happy.

He’s getting up to leave. The man. The simple fact of a man standing up shouldn’t be so alarming. It doesn’t even come close to explaining why she’s on her feet, or why she hurriedly slaps down a couple twenties for Finn or why her heels are carrying her and her devastating gold dress and her tightly-clutched clutch in his direction.

He’s already walking away, so she hurries the few steps separating them and plants herself in his path and smiles and coos, “Buy me a drink, sugar?”

He’s taken aback. Almost comically so. His eyebrows shoot up and his mouth opens and he stops dead in his tracks, and his eyes skate from her brunette curls to her hemline and back again and he doesn’t seem to have any better idea of what words could conceivably be used to reply to her opener than he did before his eyes became acquainted with her gold dress and its curves.

She smiles, and has to bite her lip to keep it from being too wide. Too real. “Just one drink?” She puts a hand on his forearm, and this isn’t her, she isn’t so cringeworthily obvious, but apparently it _is_ her, because he’s swallowing and nodding and she’s wrapping her arm through his to lead him back to his table, like if she lets go he might startle and bolt.

He pulls out her chair for her, and when she lower herself into it and lets him push it in, she gives a little extra flounce as a subtle suggestion of what other activities his night might hold. She doesn’t think he notices, though, because by that point he’s making his way to his chair, and pulling it out and sitting down, certainly no more at ease than he had been in those long minutes of watching.

“Don’t tell me,” she grins, and plants her elbows on the table and her chin in her cupped hands. “You’re here on business.”

“How did you guess?” There’s a ghost of a smile that lurks at the corner of his mouth and the edges of his eyes, and that surprises her too. She wonders how many more ways he’ll surprise her tonight.

“I hate to break it to you, sugar, but I’ve never seen a tourist dressed in a suit like yours.”

“Yeah? What do tourists wear?”

“Hmm.” She pretends to consider. “You can’t go wrong with a tee-shirt. Or a polo, if you’re feeling especially fancy. Flip-flops are a must.”

“I suppose I’m failing on all counts.”

“Nope,” she smiles. “You’re doing quite well.”

The server comes over and asks what they’d like. Rey asks for a martini with three olives. The man whose name she still doesn’t know says he’s fine, and she pouts.

“I don’t like to drink alone.”

“Scotch, then. Neat.”

The server leaves them alone. Rey leans forward, crossing her arms on the table in a way that would accentuate her breasts if she had much of anything to accentuate. “Do you really take your scotch neat, or were you just trying to impress me?”

He smiles. Big. “Did it work?”

She doesn’t mean to laugh. Not a real one, anyway. A false, flirtatious titter would’ve been fine. “What’re you gonna do when they bring you your scotch, though? I don’t know if you’ve thought this through.”

“I hadn’t planned that far ahead,” he confesses with a lopsided grin. “I think I’ll be able to choke it down, though.”

“Oh, I don’t think any choking will be involved. If you breathe and swallow, it goes down just fine.”

When he realizes, he blushes to the tips of his ears. It’s a Midwestern blush. Nothing about this man is Midwestern except those rosy ears characteristic of the men from the cornfed heart of the puritanical country. Some of them talk a big game and some won’t touch her until they’ve turned off the lights and gotten under the covers, but their ears always give them away.

“I’m Kira,” she volunteers, to give his ears time to cool down.

“I’ve never done this before.”

“Told someone your name?” She grins. “It’s a snap, sugar, I promise.”

“I’ve never—” He glances at her, then quickly away, down at the table. “Am I reading this right?”

She smiles. He’s getting easier to fit into a mental box by the minute. She can tuck him snug and comfortable into the box labeled _Isn’t sure the woman approaching him is a professional even when her opening line is something like ‘Buy me a drink, sugar.’_

The server deposits their drinks on the table. Rey raises her glass in a toast. “I’m more fun than roulette. Promise.”

He doesn’t answer. At least not until he’s picked up his glass with a death grip and downed half of it in one gulp, fears of choking evidently forgotten. She sips her water clouded with olive juice as delicately as if it were truly a martini. Then he looks her straight in the eyes and says, “Yes. I want to.” And it looks like he surprised himself, and it looks like he’s not often surprised, but there’s also a hunger in his gaze that makes her wonder for a second or maybe even two what it would be like to take him upstairs as herself and insist on real orgasms and leave with nothing more in her clutch than she entered with.

Maybe he doesn’t fit so neatly in a box, after all.


	2. Chapter 2

She doesn’t wait for him to finish his drink. “Would you like to continue this conversation upstairs, sugar?”

“Upstairs?”

Dear God, how oblivious can a grown man be. It’s exasperating how close to endearing the confused divot between his eyebrows is. “In your room?” She sucks an olive off its pick.

“Oh, no, I’m not staying at the hotel. My company has a place that I stay when I’m here. It’s not far.”

Oh. Well she wasn’t prepared for _this._ Disappointment isn’t in her emotional repertoire. A helpful side effect of not expecting anything good. But at some point in the past half hour, she apparently started to look forward to sex with this man. Or maybe what might come before, or after. His hand won’t splay across her midsection as he presses her back to him and kisses her ear. She won’t get to watch him watch her be naked. He won’t tremble beneath her as she presses her forehead to his and whispers encouragement as she coaxes his orgasm out. She won’t get to tuck him in. Well, she wouldn’t have gotten to do that anyway. It’s no loss.

“Kira?” He looks concerned. “Is something wrong?”

“No hard feelings, sugar,” she grins, strained. “But I’m not the girl for you, if you’re not staying here. Thanks anyway for the drink.” Her clutch was in her lap the whole time, so it’s quick and easy to get up and start walking back to the bar (well maybe not _easy,_ but at least quick), but then he’s bounded to her side.

“What’s wrong? Did I say something wrong?”

She flinches away from his hand on her elbow, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Finn raise the security walkie to his mouth, but she waves him down. “I don’t leave the hotel when I’m working.” She looks at the button just visible above the knot in his tie, not at him.

“It’s very close.” He’s frowning, puzzled, at her objection. “Barely ten minutes away. It has a wonderful view of the Strip. I can pay extra, if that’s—”

“It’s not that. It’s not you.” She looks up at him, willing him to understand. “I just don’t leave the hotel. It—”

“Oh. Okay. I’ll—”

“—was nice to meet you, anyway, and—”

“—get a room, then.”

“What?” She must’ve misheard.

“I’ll get a room here.” He’s still frowning gently. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah, okay.” She doesn’t realize she’s smiling until she sees it reflected back in his face.

“Okay?” He searches her eyes for lingering doubts.

“I’ll meet you by the elevators.”

“Okay. I’ll just—” he gestures vaguely over his shoulder, “—go get the room. Okay.” He doesn’t move.

“Go on, then.” She smiles altogether too much around this man.

“Okay.” He almost collides with a server in his haste, and apologizes and fumbles in his breast pocket for a bill he can slap on their table on his way out.

She would’ve been able to feel Finn’s eyes on her even if it hadn’t been for his disapproving throat-clear, so she rolls her eyes and turns to the bar to let him get it out.

“This guy is bad news.”

“Why? What, pray tell, is your objection to him?”

“It’s not _him,_ exactly.” Finn frowns. “It’s you.”

“Me!?” She laughs, surprised.

“You can’t stop smiling.”

“Of course I can.”

“Fine, then stop.”

She bites down on the insides of her cheeks, but all she manages to accomplish is sucking in her cheeks like she’s pretending to be a fish, which makes her grin all the more. “Just because I’m choosing to smile right now doesn’t mean I can’t stop, if I wanted to. And besides, _you_ were the one who told me to go for him.”

“Are you charging him?” he asks quietly and seriously.

She rolls her eyes. “Yes.”

“Then act like it.”

That sobers her up. The smile is gone, and so is that woman she didn’t recognize: the one who smiles genuinely at things her customers say and feels disappointment. She ducks her head in acknowledgement. She doesn’t tell him he’s right; he’ll have to take it for granted. Or he can if he wants to. It doesn’t matter. They’re not friends.

She examines her nails as she stands by the elevator bank, close enough for him to see her but out of the way of the comings and goings. She knows where he’ll be approaching from and stands so he can see what he’s renting: the swell of her ass and the curve of her back where it dips in to a tiny waist, or at least one that’s tiny tonight. When she’s bloated she doesn’t wear this relentlessly unforgiving dress, but tonight her waist is small and her legs are lean and there’s nothing that needs forgiving. She irrationally considers checking her clutch to make sure it has everything she needs, as if she doesn’t triple-check it every evening before leaving her apartment.

One of the security guards passes and nods at her, checking her out, but in a way that’s as close to respectful as she’s learned to be able to expect. She nods back with a smile. It’s best to keep on the staff’s good side. She has arrangements with some of them, and two bellhops and two room service runners know what it means when she texts them a room number, and they know to let themselves in if she hasn’t checked in in an hour. One of the front desk clerks gets that text too, and he knows what to do if any call to the operator is placed from that room, and all in all, she’s as safe as she can reasonably hope to be, but sometimes she thinks about how big the hotel is and how long it would take from her SOS call to the hotel door opening and exactly how much damage someone could do to her body in that space of time. That’s why she steers clear of CEOs.

Except tonight.

He unabashedly checks her out as he approaches, in a way that she’s not even sure he’s aware of, so hard-wired in his brain is it. She doesn’t resent him for it, though, the way she does the stares of other guests. At least he’s paying for the privilege.

Kira is back in full force by the time he reaches her, a key card clutched in his hand. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”

“Don’t worry about it, sugar,” she coos, in her carefully honed everything-but-the-accent southern drawl. “I can be real patient when I set my mind to it.”

It’s not quite a curse, the strangled noise that escapes his lungs, but she imagines that if she had occasion to examine his pants she might find that the front doesn’t lay nearly as flat as his tailor intended. She bites back a grin at how easy it is.

“Which floor?” she asks innocently.

He checks the paper sleeve of the card. “Thirty.”

The top three floors have their own exclusive pair of elevators, so she crooks her finger at him and leads him down the marble hall. She pushes the button to call an elevator. She always pushes the button. There’s something she likes about it. Mostly the tone it sets: that she’s in charge. This is her territory. He doesn’t object.

The elevator arrives quickly—too quickly for there to be any question of whether his hand is going to find a bare back or a generous hip to rest on while they wait. He holds out an _after you_ hand to usher her into the elevator, and she presses the button again, which gives her an excuse to turn back toward him as the doors give them privacy. She doesn’t touch him. She stands with her chest three inches from his suit and she looks up at him and smiles Kira’s syrupy, vapid smile and asks, “What’s your name, sugar?”

“Solo.” He clears his throat. “Benjamin. Ben.”

“Solo.” She turns it over in her mouth, letting her tongue caress it. “Benjamin. Ben. Which d’you want me to call you?”

“Whichever.” The swallow he takes doesn’t seem to do much to lubricate his throat. “Anything’s fine.”

“Hmm.” She tilts her head and coyly smiles up at him in a way that would make at least three quarters of men wrap an arm or two around her back. “I like you, sugar.”

She goes up on tiptoes, which in her heels doesn’t do much to contribute to her height, but it lets her get close enough to his cheek to brush her lips over his skin and murmur, “You’re allowed to touch me, if you want.”

This time she hears the ragged _fuck_ as it erupts from his mouth, and she doesn’t need to examine his trousers, because evidence of their contents is asserting itself against her abdomen, and when the elevator bell dings and the doors open and she pulls away, she thinks for several seconds that he’s going to grab her and pin her to the mirrored wall and the elevator is going to make its trek back down the lobby, and the next people will have to decide whether they mind the man desperately fucking the brunette in the gold dress in the corner or if they want to wait for the other one.

But they make it out of the elevator, and he checks the number on the key sleeve and compares it to the wayfinding signs on the wall, and she unobtrusively reaches in her clutch and sends the text by feel, just in case his blood is as high as it seems.

Still he doesn’t touch her. Not all the way down the borderline-tastefully garish carpet of the hallway that leads to the suite that he paid for so he could pay more for the opportunity to fuck her. The hotel isn’t full, she knows. He could’ve gotten a three-hundred-dollar room; he didn’t need to part with three thousand. The beds work just as well. She knows from long experience.

Money is no object to this man. She doesn’t know if he chose the suite specifically to send her that message or if it was second nature, but either way, she could break her fixed rate rule and apply a sliding scale, and he would agree. He’s never done this before, so he probably doesn’t know what to expect to pay, which is no reason to take advantage of him, and which is why she’s definitively decided to ask for her normal rate by the time he unlocks the door and holds it open for her and she walks into an expanse of dark marble with its wall of glass and a whole city spread out on the other side. “Mm, look at that view,” she hums appreciatively, and a small corner of her does appreciate it, really. Everything is cleaner and neater when it’s small. “What do you think, sugar?” she asks over her shoulder.

“Beautiful.” His voice is quiet, gruff. Contained.

She smiles at the window. She would almost be hurt if he weren’t talking about her. That’s the only cliché involved in this whole ludicrous job that she likes, or at least she does when he’s involved. Solo. Benjamin. Ben.

She pivots and slinks back toward him. Her gold dress does some of its best work in low light, and she knows it. So does he, if his twitching hands are any indication.

“What do you say we get the business part out of the way and move on to the pleasure?” She stops a half-dozen feet away and sucks her bottom lip into her mouth so it glistens.

Their hands always snap to their wallets at this point. There’s no man who isn’t some degree of awkward when it comes to the money part. She’s extra sweet with them after to make up for the indignity of being reminded that there’s payment involved. She loops her arms around their necks and nibbles their chin or kisses their nose and rubs up against them and gives them a taste of what they paid for, so by the time she breaks away to go powder her nose their hurt pride has been soothed and smoothed and coddled.

But his hand doesn’t move a centimeter—not to his wallet or anywhere else. She’s wondering how she’s going to make this part even clearer for him when he asks, “Your name isn’t really Kira, is it?”

Oh. He’s one of _these._ She mentally scoffs. “What, doesn’t it suit me?” She turns and strikes a little pose, like she puts her name on with her dress. (Well, she does, but he doesn’t need to know that.)

“It’s lovely. But I want _you._ Not Kira.”

She smiles. “Oh, Solo. You couldn’t afford me.”

“Try me.” His answer is quick and low.

“I didn’t mean...” She squeezes her clutch, frustrated. “I’m not available.”

“I’ll give you one thousand dollars for every real thing you tell me about yourself. However small.”

“No.”

“Two thousand.”

She shakes her head vehemently. “I’m not _haggling_ with you over this. I’m saying you can pay me for sex, or you can stop wasting my time and let me get back down to the bar.”

“Okay.” His tone is too casual. She can imagine it’s the one he uses when he mentally rolls up his sleeves at the start of a business deal. “How much for the month?”

She scoffs aloud this time. “This isn’t a monthly proposition, Solo. I’m not a PO box. Do you want an hour or not?”

“Two weeks, then.”

“I can also do half an hour, if you think you won’t need very long. I’m counting all this time since we got in the room, by the way, so take that into account.”

“Great. I’ll take...” He thinks for a few seconds. “Six hundred seventy-two half hours. Two weeks.”

“Limit one per customer.”

“One week, then. You drive a hard bargain.”

“If I were charitably inclined I would say I feel like you’re not understanding, but I won’t, because I know you’re just being hardheaded.” She glares up at him, and he’s grinning.

“I have to say, this is an excellent sales tactic.”

“What is?” she shoots back, frowning.

“Giving me a sample before I commit, making me want more. Extremely effective.”

She takes a break from fuming at him long enough to check that the shoulders of her dress haven’t somehow budged. They haven’t. She won’t give him the satisfaction of asking what he means, so she glowers instead.

“See? Fucking irresistible.”

When it dawns on her what exactly she’s giving him, she laughs unwillingly. “That’s cheating.”

He shrugs with a mischievous smirk. “Maybe.” He takes a step closer to her.

She doesn’t back down, even when he looms in her field of vision. “So what’ll it be, sugar? An hour?”

“I need you to know that this is the biggest concession I’ve ever made in the course of negotiations. Given the circumstances, I’m willing to come down to six nights.”

“Come down... from a week. To six nights. Quite a concession.”

“If you recall, I started at a month. I’ve already come down eighty percent.”

“I’m sure you can compute what percent decrease will bring you down to an hour.”

“I might need a calculator for that, actually.”

“I can wait, sugar.”

“Do you call people sugar when you’re not working?”

“No.” She answers before she remembers that she’s not supposed to be giving him any truths, or selling them either.

“I have to admit, I do like your persona. But I like you much better.”

“What happened to you between the bar and now? You could barely put three words together.”

He shrugs. “I didn’t expect you.”

“And you do now?”

“Sure. I know you now.”

“What exactly do you know about me?”

“You’ve never rented a PO box. You’re probably well-educated and definitely well-read. You don’t often talk to people who can match you intellectually, partly because there aren’t many people who can match you intellectually and partly because of that carefully cultivated prickly exterior. You’ve never been happily in love. Unhappily, maybe. You get angry. _Really_ angry.” He takes a step closer, so close that she can feel his breath. “It scares you, sometimes, how angry you get. You barely recognize yourself.”

She looks up defiantly. “You’re projecting.”

He shrugs. “It doesn’t mean I’m wrong, Kira.”

He raises his hand slowly and cups it alongside her head, but he doesn’t stroke her hair. He hovers close enough that she can feel the heat of his palm, but he doesn’t touch her, not until she whispers:

_“Rey.”_

“Rey,” he repeats quietly. “Your name is Rey.”

His pupils are wide and dark, sucking in every piece of light that she reflects.

“Ten thousand dollars. You. Rey. One night. That’s all.”

Kira is strong. Kira wouldn’t have nodded.

She’s not Kira tonight.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This exquisite moodboard is also the handiwork of the darling [alantieislander](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alantieislander)!

She sends the follow-up text from the bathroom: _Spending the night._

Poe, the front desk clerk, texts back _???,_ and she replies with their “all good” code: _Goldfish is fed._

She might have to deal with some questions tomorrow, and he might tell Finn, and then she’ll _definitely_ have to deal with some questions tomorrow, but tomorrow doesn’t matter at the moment, not with ten thousand dollars in her clutch and a man as close to a fantasy as she’s ever encountered waiting on the other side of the door to fuck and be fucked. This is usually when she pulls down her panties and dabs a dollop of lube from her purse between her legs. Tonight she doesn’t have to.

He’s taken off his suit jacket and tie when she emerges. He draped them carelessly on the long quartz bar that curves in a quarter-circle in one corner of the cavernous room. The bed is partly separated from the rest of the room by an intricately carved screen running floor to ceiling. It’s a space for entertaining. There should be a couple dozen people lounging on the low sofas and by the bar, but there’s only the two of them. He’s sitting on one of the sofas and untying his shoes. She doesn’t think he’s heard her emerge until he says, without looking back, “You can take your shoes off if you want.”

She does it self-consciously, though she has no reason to be. There’s something about the way that he sinks back into the couch that’s too intimate, too real, too vivid a reminder of what she’s promised him. _All night. You. Yourself._

There’s only so many times a man can have sex in one night, though she imagines that there will be some sleep involved, for him at least. But that still leaves a stretch of hours where—

“You’re hovering.”

It’s true. She made it partway to the sofa, but not all the way, so she’s standing behind him and looking at his hair and his shoulders and the way he unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled his sleeves up to just below the elbow.

She stops hovering, and comes to sit on the sofa, but a cushion and a half away. And these are long cushions. She tucks her feet up under her, wincing slightly as the sequins scratch her legs.

“What’s wrong?”

“Believe it or not, this isn’t the most comfortable dress in the world.”

“Are there robes in the bathroom?”

“Yeah?”

He shrugs. “Put one of those on.”

“Just so we’re clear, the robes in the bathroom are one size fits all. They can probably wrap around me twice over. There’s going to be nothing sexy about me in a robe.”

 _“I’ll_ be the judge of that.”

She grins, but in a frustrated way. Because that’s apparently very much a thing now, around him. A frustrated grin. “How’re you so fucking smooth when you want to be, Solo?”

He seems genuinely surprised by that. “I’m not.”

 _“I’ll_ be the judge of that,” she parrots cheekily.

He thinks for a minute, more seriously than she would’ve thought the situation warranted. “It only works when I’m not trying.”

“Oh, so you don’t want to be smooth around me anymore? That didn’t last long.”

“Base slander. I said nothing of the kind.”

“Really? Because you pretty clearly just said that you’re not trying, so...”

“Rey.” She should’ve expected it, but it still takes her aback. Her syllable from his mouth. “I desperately want two things. I want you to think I’m smooth, and I want you to be comfortable.”

“Fine,” she grins, and walks back to the bathroom. She hangs her dress on the hook that she takes the robe from, carefully, so as not to disturb the sequins any further. She wraps herself in the white cotton terrycloth, cinches the tie around her waist, folds up the cuffs, slips a couple condoms in the pocket, and looks at herself in the mirror. She’s rarely been more shapeless. The robe does little for her hips and nothing for her ass. She smirks. Serves him right. What he deserves to be punished for she doesn’t precisely remember, but she’s sure there was something.

She emerges anew. “How do you know I’ve never rented a PO box, anyway?”

He chuckles. “So I was right about that, at least.”

She pads over to him and stands between his outstretched feet and presents herself for his inspection, arms out. He makes a swivel motion with his finger, and she rolls her eyes but spins for him anyway, and when she turns back to him he grins up at her and says, “Much better.”

“Don’t tell me you would’ve preferred this to the dress downstairs.”

“I can’t think of a single thing I would’ve preferred to that dress.”

“Then how is this better?”

“You already have my full attention. It doesn’t matter what you wear.”

“Do I?” she asks airily. “Have your full attention?”

He sits up on the sofa, so he’s not leaning back against the cushion. So he can grasp her hips through the robe and tug her toward him and grab two handfuls of her ass and press her robed crotch against his face and take a lungful of terrycloth and her, but mostly terrycloth. She’s so taken aback that it doesn’t occur to her to do anything. She stands and lets him grope for an acquaintance with her shape beyond what his eyes have already relayed. He grinds his nose into her and she doesn’t know if he realizes it’s pressing the robe right into her clit or if it’s just a happy accident, but either way, it doesn’t seem that his hands will tire of kneading her ass any time soon, and as long as the ridge of his nose keeps rubbing, she can close her eyes and let her head fall back and let herself feel.

An orgasm lies at the end of this road, probably, if he keeps taking her in this direction, but that hardly matters. This is distilled hedonism. This is pleasure for its own sake, with no thought to past or future or anything in the world besides the parts of his body that are doing something to her body. This is like nothing else ever. This exists outside of time.

She whimpers.

He lets her go. He looks up.

“Are you okay?”

She nods, more to clear her head than to say yes, because whatever she is, _okay_ is woefully inadequate to describe it. She fumbles for rational thought. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Which question?” He strokes her thigh over the robe.

“Do I have your full attention?”

“Didn’t I?” He smiles. It should be just a grin, hot with desire, and it’s that too. But there’s something in the smile that’s disarmingly sincere. She agreed to be herself tonight, and _he_ didn’t make any such promise, except perhaps he did. That’s what this smile says.

Her clit still throbs for want of denied pleasure. She could open her robe and grab his hair and put his nose back where it belongs and make him do it right. But the smile knocks her off her feet: not all the way, just enough to stagger her. So she _hmphs_ and walks back to her place on the sofa, and this time when she tucks her feet under herself there are no sequins to scrape.

“Why’d you want me for the whole night, anyway? What’s the point of paying me to be here while you sleep?”

“I don’t intend on sleeping for quite a while yet, goldie.”

“Whatever will we do until then?” She bites her lip teasingly.

“I can think of a few things.”

“How many of them are sex?”

“Fewer than you might have imagined.”

She gasps. “Solo! You have some secret kink, I should’ve known! You want me to recite Shakespeare while doing a handstand against the window or something!”

 _“Can_ you recite Shakespeare while doing a handstand against the window? I would be interested in seeing that, not even in a sexual way. It sounds impressive.”

“I guess you’ll never know.” She tosses her head. “That wasn’t negotiated in our agreement.”

“Do people ask for shit like that?”

She scrunches up her nose. “Oh no, don’t be that guy.”

“What guy?”

“You’ve seen Pretty Woman, right?”

“Have I seen a pretty woman?”

“It’s a movie. Julia Roberts? Richard Gere? Hooker with a heart of gold?”

“It sounds vaguely familiar, I guess.”

“I get Richard Geres all the time. They want to know what it’s _like_ for me, if I’m _okay,_ do I have a safe place to go _home_ to, they try to give me more money.”

“And that’s... a bad thing.”

“Yes, it’s a bad thing.”

“But what if I actually care what it’s like for you?”

“Oh, I’m not saying they don’t care. A lot of them do. Or genuinely think they do, anyway. But all it boils down to is a little extra work that I have to do, beyond the rest. To reassure them.”

“Reassure them of what?”

“That they’re not bad people, and they’re not taking advantage of me.”

“I thought you said they’re concerned about you, not themselves.”

“They think they’re concerned about me. They’re really concerned about how they see themselves.”

“And you think I’m one of those men?”

“Aww, sugar, I shouldn’t have told you. See? Now your feelings are hurt. That’s what you get for asking me to be myself.”

His eyes flash. “Hurt my feelings. And don’t call me ‘sugar.’”

She crosses her arms and huffs prettily. “So bossy.”

“Stop being Kira.”

“I’m not,” she retorts. “I’m being me pretending to be Kira because I know you don’t like it.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“No, it’s not.”

“It clearly is.”

“It’s _not._ Because I told you that’s what I was doing.”

“Don’t do it again,” he snaps.

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

There’s a vein throbbing in his neck. She’s suddenly frightened that she pushed too far, that she misjudged what he could take, and she’s too far from her phone in her clutch. But then she glances down and she almost laughs in relief, because his blown pupils and ragged breaths aren’t rage at all, or if they are, they’re at least mixed with something that she has much more experience with.

“Truce?” she asks with a conciliatory smile, and she scoots toward him close enough to stretch out one naked foot and inch it over his thigh and between his legs. Her toes find his balls first, and she’s impressed by their size and heft, or at least as much as she can make out through his pants.

He grabs her ankle and holds it immobile. He doesn’t pull it away; he leaves the ball of her foot pressed to him. “What are you doing?”

“What do you think?” She reaches for the knot where her robe is tied shut and undoes it with deft fingers.

“Stop.”

She looks up at him and pauses in the process of pulling a condom from her pocket. “Why?”

“This isn’t what I want. Not like this.”

“On the bed, then?”

“Rey.” His hand on her ankle pushes her even harder against his crotch. The ball of her foot presses the base of his erection. “I want to fuck you so badly it feels like I’m going to die.”

She frowns in confusion. “Then do it.”

He closes his eyes and shakes his head firmly, resolutely, with a firmness and a resolution that are more than slightly undermined by his hand gripping her ankle and the way he’s started to rub her foot against him, pleasuring himself through his pants, though it looks more like agony than pleasure.

She’s at a loss. “What do you want me to do?”

He grits his teeth and shakes his head, his eyes still closed.

She can take a hint.

She doesn’t mind the men who ask her to keep quiet, to turn around, so all they can see is a head of brown hair that could belong to anyone, really. Their favorite porn star, or their old high school crush, or their wife before the divorce, or whatever celebrity people lust over nowadays, or some generic female amalgamation who’s not her—just a faceless embodiment of sexuality. If she had to guess, for this man it’s a specific woman. She has no real reason to think so except the suspicion that he’s a romantic at heart. _You’ve never been happily in love. Unhappily, maybe._ Her foot isn’t hers: just for now, it’s attached to the woman who first taught this man what it is to want someone so badly you feel like you’re going to die.

But no, she’s wrong. Because he opens his eyes and looks at her like no one’s ever looked at her before, and he caresses her calf with one hand while he masturbates himself with her foot, and he shakily begs, “Tell me something real.”

“I dropped out of art school.”

As personal confessions go, it’s exceptionally mundane. There’s nothing remotely sensual about it, so there’s no reason why _that_ should be the moment when he erupts in his pants with a drawn-out, shuddering moan.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, when he regains the power of speech. “I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t have the chance to ask him what for before he leans toward her. She thinks at first he means to kiss her, but he gathers her up with one strong arm around her waist and he lays her back on the sofa and he collapses beside her, and he’s lying halfway on top of her and she hates being pinned down and she’s about to tell him so when he whispers it again, into her hair.

_I’m sorry._

She hates being pinned down, usually.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to come visit me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/CeliaAnd2)! 💛


End file.
